Joel Santo DomingoDell OptiPlex 9030 TouchWith its easily accessible chassis and pivot-capable, 10-point touch screen, the Dell OptiPlex 9030 Touch is a solid all-in-one desktop that will help your business transition to Windows 8.1 Professional over the next few years.

With its easily accessible chassis and pivot-capable, 10-point touch screen, the Dell OptiPlex 9030 Touch is a solid all-in-one desktop that will help your business transition to Windows 8.1 Professional over the next few years.

The Dell OptiPlex 9030 Touch ($1,324.30 as tested) is a competent business all-in-one desktop with good ergonomics on its adjustable stand and a nice mix of components including a speedy Core i5 processor and a 10-point touch display. Its high price tag gets you a lot of features, like HDMI-in and -out ports, that will help extend the service life of the system. The OptiPlex 9030 Touch is capable of helping your business grow for the next few years.

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Design and Features The OptiPlex 9030 Touch has a utilitarian-looking black chassis, with all the components built behind the screen. This makes it relatively simple to mount using a standard VESA mounting system on an arm or wall mount (you'll have to source the mounting systems separately.). As with most all-in-one desktops, you can tilt the screen, but the stand also lets you adjust the system height, and pivot the screen from landscape to portrait orientation. This is an improvement over simpler stand on the Apple iMac 21.5-Inch (2014), the Acer Aspire Z (AZ3-615-UR15), which only tilts, and the Lenovo ThinkCentre E93z, which has tilt and height adjustment, but doesn't pivot. You can't quite tilt the OptiPlex 9030 Touch flat like the Lenovo E93z, but the Portrait mode is optimal for viewing and editing Web pages. The webcam features a physical shutter, in case your business has a strict privacy policy.

The 23-inch 1,920-by-1,080-resolution screen has 10-point touch capability, so you could theoretically use the screen by itself or share it with another user simultaneously. It displayed smooth graphics, and the 1080p resolution means that you'll be able to show large spreadsheets and full HD video. You can connect it to additional monitors via the DisplayPort or the HDMI-out port, and you can extend the utility of the internal display with the HDMI-in port. Other I/O ports include audio ports, Ethernet, an SD card slot, two USB 2.0 ports on the back, and six USB 3.0 ports. The tray-loading DVD drive can be found on the right side. The system comes with 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and bundles in a wired keyboard and mouse.

Unlike many other all-in-ones that sport a sealed chassis, like the Apple iMac and the Lenovo E93z, the OptiPlex 9030 Touch's chassis is fairly easy to get into for IT repairs and upgrades. You just detach the stand, then pop two latches on the bottom, and pull the back lid off the system. Once inside, you can access the hard drive, optical drive, and memory easily. In our review unit, there's one free memory slot and a free 2.5-inch hard drive slot. The current business all-in-one Editors' Choice HP EliteOne 800 is even easier to get into, but the OptiPlex 9030 Touch is at lease serviceable.

The system comes with 8GB of system memory and a 500GB, 5,400rpm SATA hard drive. As a result, initial boot times are a little longer than that of systems with solid-state drives (SSD) or hybrid drives. Once booted up, however, it is pretty quick. The desktop comes with a three-year warranty, including Pro Support Service and next-business-day onsite service after remote diagnostics.

Performance The OptiPlex 9030 has an Intel Core i5-4590S processor with integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600. We don't have a lot of our new benchmark test numbers for all-in-one business desktops yet, but what we see here is promising. The OptiPlex 9030 Touch garnered a very good 3,100 points on the PCMark Work Conventional test, which assesses performance on day-to-day productivity tasks. Multimedia scores were also good, at both Handbrake (1 minute 24 seconds) and Adobe Photoshop CS6 (3:25). Those are both much quicker than the Apple iMac 21.5-inch (2014), which used an ultrabook-class processor and was slower by a minute or more in both tests. The 3D gaming scores for the OptiPlex 9030 Touch were par for midrange desktops. This system has the power to keep your workers happy, at least as long as it takes to amortize the capital purchase.

The Dell OptiPlex 9030 Touch is a good business desktop, with the touch screen that's becoming almost a necessity for using Windows 8.1 Professional. That said, the HP EliteOne 800 holds on to its Editors' Choice award for all-in-one business systems on account of its easier serviceability, higher-powered Intel Core i7 processor, discrete AMD Radeon graphics, and speedy SSD.

Dell OptiPlex 9030 Touch

Bottom Line: With its easily accessible chassis and pivot-capable, 10-point touch screen, the Dell OptiPlex 9030 Touch is a solid all-in-one desktop that will help your business transition to Windows 8.1 Professional over the next few years.

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About the Author

Joel Santo Domingo is the Lead Analyst for the Desktops team at PC Magazine Labs. He joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes managing mobile, desktop and network infrastructure on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Joel is proof that you can escape the retail grind: he wore ... See Full Bio

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